Saturday, July 22, 2006

Rami Khouri on Bush comments to Blair

¨I have carefully read and considered US President George W. Bush's words to British Prime Minister Tony Blair that were inadvertently caught on an open microphone during the G-8 Summit in Russia last weekend: "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over" - and I respectfully conclude that Bush doesn't know shit about shit.¨

He then asks this question: ¨Why do the US, Europe and much of the Arab world allow Lebanon to be pulverized by Israeli bombs when most of those same people in the West last year held Lebanon up as a beacon of democratic change; a model for other Arabs?¨

Yes, why indeed?

And then he ends:

The real irony in Bush's statement is that he wants others to pressure Syria to pressure Hizbullah to change its policies - at a moment when the central pillar of Washington's Middle East policies appears to be a refusal to speak to some of the most important political groups in the region. The US has no relations or known contacts with Iran, Hamas and Hizbullah, and is not on speaking terms with Syria, which it has mildly sanctioned.

Bush ignores at his own peril the fact that Islamist political sentiments and resistance movements are the fastest growing sector of national life in the Middle East. For the US to be squarely opposed to and unable to speak with this large part of the public spectrum is foolish enough; it is even more reflective of amateur American foreign policy-making that Washington's policies in the region are an important contributor to the expansion of such Islamist sentiments and organizations.

Another irony is that Bush fails to grasp that Hizbullah's rise to prominence in the past quarter century in many ways represents a reaction to the three principal causes of mass dissatisfaction, anger, fear and humiliation among Arab populations: ineffective and autocratic Arab governments, an aggressive and predatory Israel, and a US that supports both of these tormentors of ordinary Arabs. If these underlying problems are not addressed and resolved, groups like Hizbullah will continue to emerge organically from the Middle Eastern soil, regardless of what happens to Hizbullah in the coming weeks.

Sorry for not working more with the text, but its 8:15 in the morning, and i desperately need a bed!